Download Economics in One Lesson Henry Hazlitt 9780517548233 Books
Download Economics in One Lesson Henry Hazlitt 9780517548233 Books

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Economics in One Lesson Henry Hazlitt 9780517548233 Books Reviews
- This book should be REQUIRED READING for anyone who works, pays taxes, or votes. Yes, that means YOU! I have a Bachelors degree in Economics and I can honestly say that I got (and retained) more from this book than from my four-year college program.
If you have even a passing interest in Economics, pick up this book. You’ll be glad you did! - Hazlitt's book is mainly a commentary on Bastiat's What is seen and unseen essay, but his examples are clear and convincing. The book was last updated in 1978, but several chapters are highly relevant to the tariff and immigration arguments raging today. Hazlitt's insights into the harmful effects of continual inflation and an aversion to profits for private firms are also relevant to today's most important issues. This book is easy to read but it is not "partisan". Nor is it ideological. Hazlitt does a good job of using facts to support his claims. Some will not agree with his conclusions, but no one can claim that Hazlitt presents a deliberately biased or unbalanced case. A poor understanding of economics underlies many bad decisions which have been made over the past 80 years. Hazlitt's book is one step in the educational process needed to repair the damage done.
- This changed the way I thought about well-intentioned government intervention and the economy. You should go into the book understanding that it has a clear libertarian/classical liberal orientation. It primarily has a deductive approach, which has its problems, but is incredibly useful to help readers ask the right questions about how the outcomes and goals of well-intentioned policies can diverge. The main premise is that the economic consequences of a policy need to be understood not only in light of the immediate effects on the target of the policy, but also in terms of how that intervention can distort allocation decisions of actors the policy might overlook. The book primarily looks at policies that amount to subsidies and price fixing in many forms. Be prepared for Hazlitt to kill many of the sacred cows of modern government intervention.
- Henry Hazlitt's classic Economics in One Lesson was first published in 1946, and updated during the debacle known as the Carter Administration. A journalist rather than a professional economist, Hazlitt was greatly influenced by the free marketers in the Austrian School of Economics and especially by Ludwig van Mises.
The lesson is clear and concise. Whenever government creates an economic policy to aid a particular group, the long term effects on all groups must be considered. In short chapters free of technical economic jargon, Hazlitt explains how short term policies aimed at helping one group or another are damaging to other groups, and sometimes, even to the people the legislation is intended to help.
Everyone will have a favorite chapter or two. My own are his dissection of how the price system works in a free market system, and also, in less than six pages, an absolute devastation of the minimum wage mandate, a concept creating increased unemployment, higher costs and higher consumer prices. This is because this sort of government fiat disavows the economic truth that employees should be paid based on their own productivity. Hazlitt also points that out in his explanation that unions do not raise wages, the actual market rates for employees is the determining factor.
Underlying all of this, although unsaid, is the concept of human interaction as applied to economics, as developed by von Mises. But the complexity of that theory is too deep for Hazlitt's purposes of instruction on how macroeconomics works. And that is perfectly fine.
This is the book for everyone who wants to understand how markets work. Every legislator and every executive of any governmental body should read it, too. That however would put too much strain on most of them,for too many in the political class are concerned with their own continuous goal, staying entrenched in office. And that in itself tears sound economic policy to shreds, every day in every way.
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